HERO: My Beautiful Wife, Stephanie

by Everett Moran

56, Port Townsend, WA

My beautiful wife, Stephanie, consented to marry me eight years ago. She is the very definition of character, having been raised in poverty by abusive parents and step-parents. While her siblings struggled with violent anger and substance abuse, Stephanie decided as a teenager that she was not going to live that way. She put herself through school, raised two children virtually alone, while working two jobs to make ends meet. Her now grown children are a testament to their mother’s thoughtful and balanced approach to parenting – nurturing, but tough enough to encourage self-reliance and achievement.

While her siblings struggled with violent anger and substance abuse, Stephanie decided as a teenager that she was not going to live that way.

Stephanie seldom misses an opportunity to make the world around her just a little bit better, from regularly patrolling our road to pick up trash, to providing backpacks with necessities for the homeless, to providing books and pajamas for foster children (because she remembers what it was like to be plucked from her home and placed in foster care with nothing but the clothes on her back). She has organized creek cleanups, delivered meals to others in need, and provided a safe haven for women at risk… all this from a woman who was raised with no real parenting in an every-person-for-him/herself culture.

Now, that is truly heroic.

We are fortunate to now live in a community filled with heroes. Imagine Stephanie’s “disappointment” when she went to volunteer at the local Food Bank, only to be told there was a two year waiting list! To remember to step out of one’s own life to help others is hard enough for people who were brought up with all the advantages. Stephanie could easily have been consumed by her own struggles. Instead, she summoned the strength, at a very early age, to engage and to try to make a difference in the world so that others might have it better than she did.